Using Hypermedia in Response-Based Literature Classrooms

Abstract

Response-based literature teaching and learning regards readers as active meaning-makers, and therefore emphasizes the importance of teaching and learning the processes of literary understanding, which are viewed as both socially and personally mediated. Many of the qualities of hypermedia suggest that it may be well suited for supporting such approaches. The National Center for Research on Literature Teaching and Learning’s ongoing Multimedia and Literature Teaching and Learning Project is concerned with systematically exploring this idea. The project’s first stage, detailed in this article, involved reviewing commercial multimedia literature applications from a response-based perspective. This article describes criteria developed for evaluating applications from that perspective, as well as the program acquisition and evaluation process. Findings suggest that the hypermedia literature applications currently commercially available, although technologically quite good and perhaps supportive of text-based pedagogies, are not inherently supportive of response-based literature teaching and learning. They do, however, provide indications of how such applications could be developed to do so.

Keywords:

• classroom applications
• hypermedia
• literature teaching
• learning
• multimedia
• response-based pedagogies